Syrian Students Leave Besieged Areas to Take Exams

High-school and middle-school students were able to leave besieged towns near Damascus to take their exams, but as long as the crisis continues, their educational future will remain uncertain.

(Damascus, Syria) – Surrounded by her friends, Nadia smiled as she showed them her shopping and chatted about who she visited and the places she went to in Damascus. The student was able to take her baccalaureate in commercial studies in Damascus after leaving Kfarbatna, a town south of the Syrian capital which is controlled by the opposition and under siege by government forces.

“I was able to call my brother who lives in the Gulf to wire me money,” Nadia said, adding that her brother told her to live life to the full after the months of suffering she had experienced. “I will buy whatever I want and I won’t deprive myself of anything.”

Nadia was one of many students who travelled out of besieged towns south of Damascus and in Eastern Ghouta to the capital and other government-controlled areas in June in order to take their exams. According to media statements from the education ministry, about 390 baccalaureate students and 1,000 ninth-graders made the trip. Some 400 Palestinian students also left the embattled Yarmouk camp under the supervision of the United Nations relief agency UNRWA, to take examinations in a Palestinian camp that is partially controlled by the Syrian government.

In order to leave besieged areas, students had to obtain permission from the State Security headquarters in Damascus. This became possible thanks to an initiative by local teachers,  mediated by the Baath party branch in Eastern Ghouta and UNRWA.

Despite the hard work and stress of the examinations, the students also took the opportunity to enjoy their stay in Damascus after living under harsh conditions.

In the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, some of the students stayed at the Zahi Samman School. Male students occupied the lower floors, and female ones stayed with their sisters or mothers on the upper storeys.

The Red Crescent provided free meals for the students, family members and teachers who accompanied them. The organisation also supplied mattresses and a generator to provide electricity during power cuts.

According to Mohammed, a 35-year-old volunteer with the Jaramana Aid Committee, fighters from the pro-government National Defence Forces militia filmed Red Crescent members distributing meals and claimed that it was they who provided them, all the while cheering for President Bashar al-Assad and making threats against Eastern Ghouta.

Mohammad described the National Defence Forces’ behaviour as “a disgrace and an insult to our distressed people”.

The Red Crescent stopped distributing food itself after that incident, he said, but it continued to provide daily meals via the local council, which did the actual distribution.

A 32-year-old French teacher also called Mohammed from the town of Jisrine in Eastern Ghouta confirmed that this incident took place. But many teachers were nevertheless just as happy as their students to get a break from such a long period of living under siege. After claiming back pay, many teachers hurried to the markets to shop for gifts and clothes and dine at restaurants.

Raghida, a 24-year-old Arabic teacher from Saqba in Eastern Ghouta, said she had not received her state salary for a year because her town was cut off.

“We haven’t been able to communicate with the ministry of education because there are no phone lines,” she said, adding that when teachers wanted to contact ministry staff, they used the WhatsApp mobile application.

According to the United Nations, at least one fifth of schools in Syria had been damaged by conflict as of the end of 2013.

Opposition Islamist groups have opened their own schools in Eastern Ghouta, providing free meals and transport. But many pupils still attend the badly under-resourced state schools. In besieged towns near Damascus, the government schools that are still functioning are run by the few teachers who remain or by university graduates.

The siege has made it very hard for such teachers to do their jobs.

Raghida told Damascus Bureau that she and her colleagues struggled to provide classes with the books they needed. They had to scour  government warehouses, some of them in dangerous locations, or try to gather in old textbooks used by previous generations of pupils.

The opposition National Coalition has formed its own education ministry, but it has been unable to fill the vacuum in besieged areas. A ministry spokesman in Gaziantep, Turkey, told Damascus Bureau that the ministry was able to organise school examinations in opposition-controlled areas and also in neighbouring countries, but not in towns near Damascus.

Once in Damascus, both teachers and pupils  faced a dilemma about whether to return to their homes in besieged areas, or to stay on in the capital. For students, returning to Ghouta means losing out on a chance to go to university, and returning to living conditions that are probably the harshest in Syria. Staying on in Damascus, on the other hand, would amount to abandoning their relatives still under siege.

Mohammed, the French teacher, said he had been hesitant about leaving Ghouta in the first place, but went because no one else was willing to travel with the students. He believes that people who do useful work in Ghouta have a duty to return because of the dearth of skills in all fields, although he thinks unproductive people should leave as they are a burden on others.

“As long as there’s someone inside [Eastern Ghouta], I will stay there to help them,” he said. He is now the only French teacher in the town of Jisrine and the surrounding area.

The results of the examinations were announced in late July. Nadia passed and was awarded her baccalaureate, and she is now waiting to go back  to Damascus to apply to sit an additional exam that will allow her to improve her grades and enrol at university.